Alright, let’s talk about this little project I tinkered with, trying to make something like the old Windows crossword puzzle game. It wasn’t some grand plan, really. Just felt like doing something hands-on, something simple, you know?
Getting Started
So, first off, I just booted up my old machine. Had a look at the original thing, or what I remembered of it. Pretty basic stuff. A grid, clues, you type in the letters. Didn’t seem too scary.
I thought about what to use. Could’ve gone fancy, maybe some web stuff. But nah, wanted to keep it simple, desktop-y. Fired up a basic coding environment I had lying around. Didn’t even bother setting up anything complicated. Just wanted to get pixels on the screen first.
The first hurdle was just drawing the grid. Sounds easy, right? Well, getting the boxes lined up, handling the numbering, making space for the clues… took longer than I thought. Lots of fiddling with coordinates and loops. Got something basic showing up after an evening or two.
Building the Core
Next up: putting words in. This was the tricky bit. How do you get the words to cross properly? I first tried just manually placing words onto my grid design. That worked for one puzzle, obviously. But that’s not really a generator, is it?
So I looked into generating the layout. Found some articles talking about algorithms, backtracking, fancy stuff. Tried to implement one. Let’s just say it didn’t go well. Got tangled up in logic, stuff kept breaking or running forever. It was a mess.
I ditched that complex approach. Went back to basics. Decided to just create a few fixed grid layouts. Hardcoded them. Felt a bit like cheating, but honestly, I just wanted something that worked so I could move on. My goal wasn’t building the world’s best crossword generator, just something like the Windows one.
- Drew the grids on paper first. Yes, actual paper.
- Figured out the coordinates for the start of each word.
- Stored these layouts somehow.
- Wrote code to load a layout and the corresponding word list.
Then came the interaction part. Clicking a box, highlighting the word (across or down), typing letters. That was more straightforward. Handling key presses, updating the grid display. Still fiddly, lots of small bugs to iron out. Like, what happens when you press backspace? Or arrow keys? Had to handle all those little cases.
Adding Clues and Checking
Displaying the clues was easy enough. Just needed a text area next to the grid. Linked the clues to the word positions I’d already figured out.
Checking answers was simple too. When the user thinks they’re done, or maybe checks a single word, just compare the letters they typed against the actual solution word. Maybe add a little visual feedback, like changing the color.
I remember spending a whole afternoon just trying to get the highlighting right when you select a clue. Click a clue, highlight the word boxes in the grid. Click a box in the grid, highlight the corresponding clue. Sounds trivial, but making it feel smooth took some tweaking.
Where It Ended Up
So, what’s the final result? It’s… okay. It looks vaguely like the old Windows crossword. You can load a puzzle (from the few I hardcoded layouts and words for), you can type in answers, you can check them. It sort of works.
It’s definitely not polished. The UI is clunky. There’s no fancy animations. Generating new puzzles automatically? Forget about it, that algorithm thing beat me. It was just a little experiment, really.
Learned a bit about handling basic UI stuff from scratch, dealing with grid logic. Mostly reinforced that sometimes the “proper” way (like complex algorithms) isn’t worth the headache if a simpler, dumber approach gets you 80% of the way there for your own little project. Got distracted by something else eventually, think I started messing with an old radio I found. So the crossword thing just sits there now. Maybe I’ll pick it up again someday, maybe not. It was a decent way to kill some time.
